Category: 1920s

Boxing’s first million-dollar gate was the match between American boxer Jack Dempsey and French boxer Georges Carpentier that took place in New Jersey on July 2, 1921.

That morning, a baby boy was born in Pittsburgh to Mr. and Mrs. John Mahoney. “[A]s the father was an enthusiastic rooter for the Irish fighter, it was decided to hold off naming the baby till after the result of the Jersey City fight should be known.”

Dempsey won in the 4th round. So the baby was named John Dempsey Mahoney.

Mr. Mahoney’s brother, a Carpentier supporter, stopped by later that night. The men fought over the baby’s name and ended up at the police station, charged with disorderly conduct.

The magistrate ordered the uncle to buy John Dempsey Mahoney his first pair of shoes.

Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, welcomed their only child in October of 1923. The baby boy was named John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway.

The name Nicanor was inspired by Spanish torero (bullfighter) Nicanor Villalta. It can be traced back to the ancient Greek word nike, meaning “victory.”

The interesting thing? While we all know that Hemingway was a bullfighting fan, at the time his son was born, he had only recently become a fan.

When Hemingway saw his first bullfight in Pamplona in 1923, he brought his wife Hadley along because he hoped the event would have a positive influence on the unborn son she then carried. The sport certainly affected the budding writer. It became one of the reigning passions of his life.

In August of 1929, the 775-foot, hydrogen-filled LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin became the first lighter-than-air craft to circle the globe. The rigid airship traveled from Lakehurst (New Jersey) to Friedrichshafen (Germany) to Tokyo (Japan) to Los Angeles (California) and back to Lakehurst in about three weeks, from August 8 to August 29.

The Pacific crossing didn’t actually take the ship directly to Los Angeles, but to San Francisco first. The ship’s commander, Hugo Eckener, “deliberately timed his flight…to make a dramatic entrance through San Francisco’s Golden Gate with the sun setting behind the ship.” The dirigible made several passes over San Francisco on August 25 before continuing down the coast to L.A.

The scene must have made a big impression on the Wong family of San Francisco, because a week later, on September 1, they welcomed a baby boy and named him Zeppelin Wai Wong.

Zeppelin Wai Wong went on to attend Stanford and become a successful attorney. In 1953, San Francisco journalist Herb Caen mentioned Zep in his book Don’t Call it Frisco:

One of San Francisco’s more oddly named citizens is a Stanford graduate named Zeppelin Wai Wong — and naturally, everybody wonders how come. Very simple, really. Zeppelin (or “Zep”) was born in San Francisco on September 1, 1929, while the German dirigible, Graf Zeppelin was droning overhead — and he thinks the strange name (his father’s idea) is O.K. “Could be worse,” he points out “Suppose it had been the Shenandoah?”

(The USS Shenandoah was a U.S. Navy airship that had crash landed in 1925.)

The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin remained in service until mid-1937, when it was grounded permanently following the Hindenburg disaster.

Many moons ago, I wrote about Airlene. She was born in an airplane in 1929.

Many of the sources I consulted for that post explicitly stated that Airlene was the first baby born in an airplane. I hadn’t seen any contradictory evidence at the time, so I assumed this was true.

Just the other day, though, I discovered that a French baby had been born in an airplane in the summer of 1922 — seven years earlier.

The French baby was the son of Madame Georges Breyer of Lyon. She was staying at a seaside resort in Southern Italy when she went into labor. She chartered a plane northward to Naples, and gave birth 40 miles south of Naples and 6,000 feet over the Mediterranean.

She said she would name the baby Guynemer, in honor of famous French military aviator Georges Guynemer.

This news was printed in papers all over the U.S. for a day or two. Then…nada. No follow-up, no interviews, no extra details. I’ve had no luck tracking down the mom, the baby, or even the Breyer family of Lyon — at least not in any of the English-languages sources I’ve checked. (Anyone want to do a quick search of French or Italian sources for me?)

As far as I know, Airlene is still the first U.S. airplane baby. But it looks like Guynemer could be the world’s first airplane baby, if this story checks out.